Eshaness | Is it Force or Failure
the moment’s quiver
—a wind-forced sea the sea
remembers
in long swells far from wind
cutting rock
as a pallet knife
cuts away
the sheer illogical force of paint
itself—a thousand miles
of water flickering
black/blue
now shoaling turquoise
breaking white on stacked lava
laced in fracture
the wave & ebb
of rock, now stilled
torn by waves that nest
in the pure black
in the purple-black
one slice of red in chaos
of collisions : a sunlit boil
strikes & circles
offshore rock
reels off the shattered cliff
to swallow that rock
whole : is this what nothing
looks like? a clifftop boulder
pocked with holes
where clast & lava
have parted ways, events of mind
impossible
without impact, without sensation
of thought diffusing
at body’s edge—
the sea-pinks, the fulmars
the lichen, the moss
on sweeps of ash-gray magma
tipped & shattered :
no limit of skin, no pause of need
for the absolute certainty
that rock lives in every cell
that color is
the behavior of light
that words
will not stop turning
into words : all that is made
or cut away, not by wind
that bends the flowers
stings the eye, but wind carried
a thousand miles through water—
the moment quivers
& the hand on rock
takes what rock
takes
& what it gives
From North|Rock|Edge: Shetland 2017/2019, first published in Oversound.
